Take me back to the homepage ion wanna be here

in this article i will be noting my successes and failures on getting the i1 to run on real hardware

fuck gatekeeping im telling you how i get to each result so you the viewer can do this at home!!!

what even is an i1 anyways

The IntelliStar 1 (which you might see referred to as just “IntelliStar”) is the old presentation engine TWC used from sometime in the mid 2000s idfk to around 2015. While the units used for LOT8s died in 2015, the ones on Weatherscan would survive until 2022. For the record the i1 would be old enough to drink alcohol in Europe by the time it (and Weatherscan) was retired.

Unlike the i2 family, which uses Windows and was introduced in 2010 (fun fact - did you know the i2HD uses Windows XP?), the i1 used FreeBSD to generate its graphics.

BSD? WTF?

While I think I kinda know what I’m doing when it comes to Linux, the same can not be said for BSD. Actually quite the opposite I didn’t know about BSD until about 2 or 3 years ago, and I’ve never gone out of my way to install it on something because I’d rather not face the learning curve coming from Linux because let’s be real, I have time for many things, but learning BSD for a funny project is not one of them.

Fun fact #2 - macOS and FreeBSD are distant relatives. Unfortunately for this project I do not have significant experience with either.

the hardware

For this guide I will be using an HP EliteDesk 800 SFF G2 with an aftermarket GT 1030. I know, I know, it’s the worst GPU ever, but it’ll have to do. At least I’m not daily driving it anymore.

The CPU in this computer is a 6th gen/Skylake i5. I mean it’s alright.

You might recognize this server if you’ve stalked me elsewhere, because that’s right it’s the same machine I installed all my selfhosted applications on from that one summer challenge that fell on its face. It is truly my general purpose workhorse machine when I don’t have a VPS to terrorize.

What YOU should have if you intend to attempt to follow this guide

• A computer. Optimally it should have:
  • At least a 4th gen i5. We’re running software from the same time Half-Life 2 came out, if not earlier. You don’t need a top spec CPU.
  • Some kind of GPU. Your CPU shouldn’t have to bear the consequences of whatever crack TWC was smoking while making the i1. Doesn’t need to be that powerful, and unlike the i2 I’m not sure if there are any vendor requirements like there are with the i2. Basically you don’t need early access to the RTX 6090.
• A second computer, that you should be either reading this guide on or doing the download steps on. FreeBSD circa 2003 isn’t a very good OS to daily drive
• Some form of external storage that’s at least 32GB (you REALLY only need 21 but it’s safe to have more)
  • MAKE SURE IT HAS VENTOY OR SOMETHING SIMILAR ON IT!!! THIS GUIDE WILL NOT WORK OTHERWISE!! Ventoy is stupid easy to install if you have an empty drive. Just drag and drop and whatever ISO you have becomes bootable! ventoy.net
  • If you want my recommendation I use a 1TB SanDisk SSD in this article

part 1 - setup

So first we need to get the i1 image. Had I made this about a year earlier I would have needed to make back alley deals with “high profile” people in the TWC community but thanks to like minded people who agree gatekeeping fucking sucks we can go to a website and download it. At the cost of precious bandwidth. Oh well it’s not like it matters anyways, my bandwidth resets in literally 3 days.

The magic link is https://9dcrew.org/archive. They have all sorts of IntelliStar images there - except for the i2HD, probably because they’re getting rarer. Today we’re looking for an i1 image though so we need to scroll to the bottom.